Founder Claire Talks About Email Overwhelm on The Ideas Lab Podcast
Just imagine that you never had to look at your email inbox, read or reply to any emails ever again. How much free time would you have? What could you use that time for in your business or in your personal life? That is a question John explored with Claire Giovino in this episode of the ideas lab podcast, because she has set up a business to do exactly this for her clients.
She launched InboxDone in 2017, and has grown the business to multiple six figures in just 11 months with zero startup capital. Claire currently manages a growing team of remote inbox managers and upwards of 3000 plus emails a day, all while traveling the world or at least until recently.
So John wanted to ask Claire what are we all getting wrong about email and if we want to move away from our own inbox and stop it dominating our working day, how does someone really outsource something that is so fundamental to what we do day in and day out?
He also wanted to find out how Claire has made such a success of InboxDone and how she’s made that work in partnership with Yaro Starak, one of the pioneers of internet marketing and blogging. It’s going to be a great episode. Let’s dive in.
CLAIRE
"We never could have saw this coming, this technology, the volume and the speed of what's possible, is why we're so overwhelmed. We treat email a lot in the same way like old letter writing, old snail mail, but the volume and speed is just what's made it so overwhelming.
Email often acts as a to-do list for a lot of people. And so, what that's become is anyone in the world can write in at any time and add to your to-do list. That's an impossible expectation to keep up with."
JOHN
Just imagine that you never have to look at your email inbox, read, or reply to any emails ever again. How much free time would you have? What could you use that time for in your business or in your personal life?
That is a question I explored with Claire Giovino in today's episode with The Ideas Lab Podcast, because she has set up a business to do exactly this for people, to make it possible. She launched Inbox Done in 2017 and has grown the business to multiple six figures in just 11 months with zero startup capital. She currently manages a growing team of remote inbox managers and upwards of 3000 plus emails a day, all while traveling the world, or at least until recently.
I wanted to ask her, what are we all getting wrong about email? And, if we want to move away from our own inbox and stop it dominating our working day, how do you really outsource something that is so fundamental to what we do day in and day out? And, I also wanted to find out how Claire has made such a success of Inbox Done, and how she's made that work in a partnership with Yaro Starak, who is one of the founders, one of the pioneers of Internet Marketing and blogging. So, it's going to be a great episode. Let's dive in.
INTERVIEW
JOHN
Claire, thanks very much for joining us. I got to ask you the question, you know about email and how to make it work for people because this is your business that you built. What are we doing wrong with email? I'm a disaster area of email. What are people typically getting wrong with their email inbox?
CLAIRE
The most common issue for, myself included, is re-reading the same email multiple times and taking no action with it. On average, it’s three to four times per email, which is just wasted energy, wasted time throughout the day. Even if we're not consciously aware of it, our brain is still lodging that one email up in our brain, which is causing clutter. And then you add hundreds of emails to that. And that's what creates those backlogs in our inboxes too, because we don't have clear set rules for how to handle each email.
JOHN
So, what you're saying-- that's really interesting. I hadn't really connected the dots between multiple readings and this buildup in your inbox. But, what do you mean by rules? What kind of rules might you apply to emails?
CLAIRE
Yes. Some of them we do automatically. You already have rules in your head for, "This is an email I always delete." "This is an email I always forward." "This is something I always file."
But some things we've just never taken the time to say, "Okay, this is the template that will always be sent out when I receive this type of email." Or, "Someone else on my team can handle. There's no reason I need to be handling this. This will always be a forward."
And so, a lot of people do. They unconsciously have created rules in their head, but just never documented them. And so, if you're looking to teach someone how to handle your email, that process will either be drawn out of your head or created with somebody.
JOHN
Okay, yes. That's interesting. I feel frustrated, and I don't know if there's any technical solution that you know of for this. But there are certain emails I want to always forward to the same place. I know there doesn't appear to be any way to do a keyboard combination that says, "Forward this to this person."
CLAIRE
Right. You can create a filter for that easily where it will skip your inbox entirely because the goal is for you to have to sift through as little as possible in your inbox. So, you can set up a filter that will forward it to the address you want it to go to. And then, it will add it to… if you don't want it to delete or disappear, the filter can also put it in a specific folder for you, too.
JOHN
Yes, I mean, the challenge for me is that I’ve got so many things that’s classed as receipts. I want to whenever I see a receipt forwarded to my receipt system, which scans it.
The problem is you can only set up a rule dependent on the content, so I'd have to do it for every kind of receipt I ever receive. And I'm too lazy to do that.
[Laughter]
CLAIRE
Well, that's where the psychology of it comes in, which is the most interesting part to me. Honestly, this is never like an industry or field I thought I'd be getting into, but the psychology of setting up a system to begin with that serves you for the rest of your life. It's a little bit of overcoming that hurdle of, "Okay, this is going to take a little bit more time now, but it's going to save me hours and hours of time down the road."
JOHN
Yes, okay, valid [chuckle].
And so, what you do for people with Inbox Done is you take people's email, you just take email away from people. People can outsource their inbox to somebody else to you, or to your business rather.
But I imagine there's a lot of resistance. I think people would have all sorts of fears around that. I immediately think, like, I'm not a person who thinks in terms of systems and processes, which I have a feeling you probably do. And so to me, it's all one massive unsystematic mess, but I could never apply any rules to, so some of that, for instance, how do I separate the stuff for... one of the first thoughts, because sometimes I get private emails and they come to my same account. I can't stop my friends from using an email address that they poked into their email program three years ago. They're still going to email me about something. So, how do I separate that out? And then, can people really answer for me? What if something falls through the cracks? Are these kind of the things that you have to deal with, with customers all the time?
CLAIRE
All the time, yes. And there's some technical answers to what you said. And then, there's some psychological answers there. Some people will never be okay with it. The inbox is a very personal space and so, that's totally fine.
But, for the people who are ready and open to the process, people come to us and they feel overwhelmed with their inbox or they realize what a time suck it's become, but kind of the more hidden pain point that we're solving is finding you somebody who has been trained and who is qualified and who knows all the systems, so you don't have to know the systems. That would not be your job as the client to build the systems and know what questions to ask. We're going to ask all those questions for you and draw the information out of you and what already lives up in your brain. But yes, all that resistance is there. It can be the resistance of, "Well, I'm the only one who could ever answer this type of email."
It's not quite true. When it comes to your specific niche of expertise, yes. No one's ever going to replace you and the overlap of all your skill sets, but you can train someone to think like you. That's what we're really doing is bringing in this assistant who really becomes the representative of you and your business. And instead of just delegating to them, they're learning how to make decisions like you in the inbox. So, it's really a lot of people are looking to clone themselves in the inbox. That's our aim. And, that's what brings about the assurance and the trust once they see that process playing out, and people responding just like them or even better than them sometimes. JOHN Right, oh, that's interesting.
CLAIRE
Yes.
JOHN
Yes. And, what’s the… I suppose I'm still getting my head around this… Okay, so let's dive into this a little bit. If I was going to sign up with Inbox Done, what are some of the things you would work with me to do first? How would you approach that onboarding process? Because at the moment, it seems like some sort of magic I don't understand.
CLAIRE
[Chuckle] Well, this is years that have gone into the system. So, I wouldn't expect it to be this black and white thing right out the gate. So, first is just looking at where you are at right now, how many hours are you spending in your inbox? What platform-- is that Outlook, is it Gmail, is it Apple Mail? What are you using? Is it more on your desktop? Is it more on your phone? Because we want to match your style in whatever way you're looking at your email.
How often would you like to check it? A lot of clients have these really small goals like, "Well, maybe if I could take off an hour a day, that would be great."
But we've gotten clients to the point where they now just check their email once a month, or not at all. And so, your willingness to let go-- and I know it doesn't happen overnight. It's a very gradual process-- leads to this freedom from your inbox and freedom from the anxiety of email and feeling like there's always something there that needs your attention as much as you're able to let go.
JOHN
That's interesting. Presumably, I mean, it's not like I never want to see those emails. There must be a point at which they come back to me, ask the person who's working with me in Inbox Done would ask me, "What response is appropriate or something?" How does that work?
CLAIRE
Yes, exactly. So, one thing our clients say a lot is I want to be out of my inbox but stay in the loop. So, it wouldn't give you peace and assurance to not have to do email anymore but have no idea what's going on in your own business.
There are many ways we can do that. It can be a recap at the end of every day of, "Here's what's happened. Here's all the FYI. Here's what I sent out. Here's what still needs your attention." Or, we have some clients who still, they can't help themselves. They still log into the inbox all the time, but just the knowledge that they don't have to actually do anything is huge. They just see everything being handled for them.
JOHN
Okay, I like this. And presumably, I like that daily summary. And I can't imagine what I’d do without [chuckle] stuff to do, which is an interesting question, isn't it?
CLAIRE
Yes, that's THE question and that is exactly, that's what we ask. One of the first things in the onboarding process is we promise we're going to get you so much free time back. So, how are you going to fill that time? Email is like one of the ultimate procrastinators that keeps us feeling busy and productive, but not ever quite moving us towards the big goals and the big things that we want to create.
JOHN
Yes, yes. I noticed when I moved to Gmail, I was a little bit reluctant to do it, because I think it's a little bit kind of clunky. But I know people are big fans. In algorithm terms, it's great, but it just looks ugly. And I don't like ugly looking things in technology. But, I moved over to Gmail and I discovered it was saving me something like two hours a day because with the automatic filtering of-- the spam filter is a lot better, first of all than I was using Apple Mail-- and spam filtering is a lot better, but also the sifting into promotions and updates is really useful because the number of stuff coming into my actual inbox, for anyone who has no Gmail, is now quite small.
And, all I do is, particularly when I am busy, like when I got a deadline or I'm traveling or something, I just, if I just keep up with the main inbox, I know life is not going to fall apart usually, unless something's sneaked into updates, which is actually quite important like British guy says, you know, we don’t receive your last pay, we're going to cut your gas off or something like that.
It's good for under updates because that's where their normal updates come from. So, as long as I scan that every so often, and then the promotions, if I don't read it for several days, it doesn't actually matter anyway. So, I will scan it and then say like, "Okay, I want to read that, that and that." And if I'm busy, I just won't.
So already, I can see how that level of sifting… I mean, it was quite a shock that I was literally saving, I should have been able to logically do that in my head as I was looking in my inbox and go but that's just a promo and that's just a regular update, and that's an important email. But it wasn't happening. And so, I can only imagine what the saving would be if I moved to a service like yours.
CLAIRE
And people started replying for you, yes, That's the thing. We only have a limited bandwidth and limited decision-making energy for any given day. And all of those minor decisions add up and take away from the bigger decisions that we have to make in a day.
Yes, that's fascinating because those extra... the promotions and social actually stresses me out because of my OCD. I know there's like stuff sitting there and I just want it all to be clear. So I'm glad that's working for me.
JOHN
Right… Yes.
I've also got another system that's worked for me and I remember talking to somebody on Twitter. He was quite famous for productivity, and he was skeptical. I can't remember who it was now. But I have a thing. I set up a link which shows me just today's emails for the last 24 hours. And then, I was gone for two days, three days.
And so, often I'll be overwhelmed looking at my inbox because I do not clear it. But, if I look at one day, it starts off looking like a lot.
And very quickly, it sifts down to almost nothing because there's a bunch of stuff, which I've already dealt with, which just needs filing or deleting. And then, it comes down very quickly to like, "Okay, actually, I'm now no longer behind, at least on this day."
And so, for me, that's another thing that works. It's kind of managing, I have to manage my own perfectionism. And I don't have a good way of dealing with everything to the level of perfectionism that I cope with.
I think the other thing I've noticed I use my PA for is that there's a difference between knowing what the answer is for somebody on an email and writing an email with the answer in it.
And speaking as a former software engineer, we talk in networking terms like I studied networks when I was at college and did networking software. We talked about handshaking. And there's this handshaking before and after every transmission of information, which is basically just [unclear]. It just ensures that the transmission goes, okay.
To me, the "Hi! How are you doing? How's thingy... whatever," and then, insert actual thing you want to say signed off by, "I hope everything's going fine. See you. Stay safe (as everyone is saying at the moment)!"
It’s just like, as a programmer I sometimes just go like, "Can some other humans do that?" And just tell them like no or yes in the body of the email, but make you sound less rude than when I'm saying it. Because I tend to be a little bit blunt. Just because I feel in a hurry. But that stuff doesn't trip off the tongue for me.
And that's part of the function of somebody… because often you know what you need to say, which is like, "No, I can't do what you just asked," or "Yes, but I’m going to need this," but you need to buffer it with a load of like, "I know you're human and you have feelings about this?"
CLAIRE
Exactly. I see you. I'm a human, you're a human. Exactly. And that's where the email assistant can really write even better for you. And when especially once they learn those answers, what's actually the core answer in this email, and also research has shown that we don't tend to read the whole email, especially if it gets too lengthy. And so, putting that action point in the first sentence or two is still really important, because then you're most likely to get a response and most likely to grab attention. But yes, and even… if you're a business owner, say you have a lot of emotional bias and ties to your business and so having like a third party come in, they can actually write sales emails even better, build those relationships, and cultivate those relationships, sometimes even better than the owner, which is fascinating to watch.
JOHN
Yes, that was interesting. I heard somebody who outsourced their sales calls and they expected conversions to go down, but they were going to factor it in because they'd be able to do more sales calls. Conversions actually went up.
CLAIRE
Exactly.
JOHN
And that’s interesting.
CLAIRE
Love that.
JOHN
So, one other little bit about how you built this business, before we do this, I think just to finish on this point for anybody who is really struggling and feels like their inbox is completely out of control and has 12,000 unread emails. What is the very worst thing that we do that dooms us to failure in email? Is there something in particular? Is it just a hard slog that we've got to work through it everyday, or is it something stupid we're all doing?
CLAIRE
No. No one is stupid. I don't think we have to slog through every day. I think it's tweaking our expectations for our self and then, other people's expectations. So, in a way, we're almost, I advocate for kind of conditioning, the people that you are writing to. If people get used to hearing from you within 20 minutes, then that's what they're going to expect. And that's the pace at which they're going to communicate with you.
But we never could have saw this coming, this technology, the volume and the speed of what's possible, is why we're so overwhelmed. So, we treat email a lot in the same way as old letter-writing, old snail mail, but the volume and speed is just what's made it so overwhelming. Bringing it back more to the email often acts as a to-do list for a lot of people. And so, what that's become is anyone in the world can write in at any time and add to your to-do list. That's an impossible expectation to keep up with.
I understand if you're in a job and there's certain expectations about response times built into your job, that's one thing, but there are still ways to work around that. And so, really figuring out, "Okay, is an hour response time expected of me? Is 24 hours okay?", which is what we advocate for, and then just realizing you do not have to respond to every single email. You really don't and being not intentional about choosing where I'm going to put my time and focus is right out the gate, one of the most important things you can do, alongside minimizing what's actually coming in. And so, you can minimize by doing mass unsubscribes or setting up all those filters so the volume of what you're actually seeing every day is reduced, too.
JOHN
Right, okay. That's some good tips. I like that.
How did you-- this business is doing very well now of Inbox Done, and I'm interested in the journey because I help people start businesses, so I'm curious, was the formation, did that come from you working with Yaro Starak providing a service for him or what was the beginning? When did you first think this could be a business?
CLAIRE
Yes, so Yaro was my client for a while before we decided to launch this business together. And essentially, Yaro has been ahead of the game and that he outsourced all these different parts of his business. But email still was a pain point. And so, I optimized his inbox in a lot of ways and boosted these systems there, so that he got to the point where he was only checking once a month. We wondered together if we combined our mutual networks, could this be-- what I had done for him-- could we package it up and sell it to other CEOs, professionals, business owners?
So, we did a beta testing first and just very much staying small and within his network, and it worked. I was in the beginning doing multiple inboxes at the start, and then, staying up all hours because I was trying to stay in everybody's different time zones.
And so, then the next question was, could I train other people to follow these systems and procedures and ask them the questions that were needed? So then, we brought on our first inbox manager. And now, yes, we have a team that's constantly growing of inbox managers from around the world.
JOHN
So, when you started were you just providing it for Yaro yourself? Was that the idea? CLAIRE Mm-hmm.
JOHN
That's interesting, isn't it because I'm always interested in that path from idea to business. You did so much often recommend to client which is, first of all, you create a business based on something you're already doing, but you proved it by, first of all doing it for Yaro and then, doing it for a small selection of his clients and delivering it yourself and then, going and hiring other people and proving that you can get them to give as good a service as you.
Now you probably have all sorts of other fun challenges like scaling a business and changing your role in managing a team and all that kind of stuff.
CLAIRE
Yes. And, I never wanted to be the bottleneck of this business and that’s ironically what we see in our clients is for as long as they are the ones doing their email and feeling like they're the only ones who can do their email, they often remain the bottleneck and it prevents that scaling from happening. So yes, now the biggest focus is building awareness because all of those tears of management have been built and yes, all the systems are in place.
JOHN
Wow. And what's your plans from here? You're taking on new people all the time, I assume. Where do you see yourself going next with it?
CLAIRE
That's a good question. I am very into slow growth. I've never been in a hurry to expand or to scale. I think Yaro and I balance each other out really well in that way. And so, I would like... I have no plans beyond keeping it a boutique service because I love the relationship building that happens and the relationship between client and inbox manager. These relationships have now been going on for years. They’ve become such a crucial part of each client's team. And so, really focusing on that relationship cultivation, I think aligns with that slow growth. But yes, you mentioned before the benefits of aligning with a partner when you're starting in business and that was huge. Part of it is, I love being able to bounce ideas off of Yaro and talk with him and I know the growth has come because of our interaction or collaboration and tapping into each other's mutual audiences, too.
JOHN And, I think that's really... it sounds like you're a good kind of different personalities and you complement each other. He has a big following because he was one of the pioneers in blogging in internet marketing from, God knows, 20 years probably. And, you someone more of a systems and processes person. He sounds like a typical speedy creative entrepreneur who has brilliant ideas. And so, that's a good combination. His massive following are exactly the kind of people who need you and your service.
It's a good lesson for anybody who wants to start a business. Find a partner who brings a complement, because I think what often people do is, they partner with somebody who's exactly like them, like their friend. It's like, "Oh, we're both creative. Let's go and create this business." And now, he's going to remember to file the insurance forms and everything else. All that stuff gets missed.
CLAIRE
Exactly. Yes. And he's very aware of, knowing what you're good at is as important as knowing what you're not good at and hiring was one of the things where he knew he needed someone to step in for. So, yes. There's that awareness that your partner can act as a mirror in a lot of ways in your business.
JOHN
Mm-hmm. Great. Are you effectively location independent? Or, do you go traveling a lot? I heard some mention of you being a traveler?
CLAIRE
I do, yes.
JOHN
But, not at the moment presumably because at the time I’m recording this, we’re all in lockdown. But this is... what do you normally do? You've got a home base, presumably, have you?
CLAIRE
Yes, my home base is Portland, Oregon. That's where I am now. But yes, again, that was the... everyone, I think asking why you're starting a business. I think people think starting in business brings all this time freedom right out the gate. You don't have your nine to five anymore, and you don't have your boss, but it brings this whole other host of responsibilities. And now, it's on you to how are you going to fill each day and find bringing clients?
And so, my initial motivation was just geographic independence and being able to live anywhere and work remotely. And then, once I achieved that I realized, "Okay, the next level of freedom is not exchanging my time for money." So that's the next level of freedom.
But yes, I could. I was just in Paris for almost a month over the fall, and I was able to do that because other people were running the business.
JOHN
Yes, that sounds great. Yes. Asia is the place I normally go to. I spent a month in Bali at the end of last year and a month in Thailand, just as the Coronavirus was taking off. And despite the fact that I came home in mid-February when it was obvious, things were going seriously badly wrong, it apparently, here we are in mid-April and we still haven't got enough of everything. We're supposed to use personal protection equipment. And so, it's bizarre when I was debating whether to go to Bangkok, which I was flying out of whether to travel around Bangkok because I thought it might be risky. And yet, that's two months ago, and that was apparently not enough on the mindsets of our leaders in the world to actually get ourselves ready for things.
So yes, well, hopefully we'll all be let out in a while. And maybe, I guess, I think it might be next year before we go on any big location-independent jobs, people like you and I. But that's been really interesting to hear about Inbox Done.
If you want to find out more, I think you have to go to InboxDone.com, first of all, and you said there was an offer of a free discovery call for someone who wants to talk you through?
CLAIRE
Yes, InboxDone.com/discovery. That would just be similar to what we're doing now honestly, just answering any questions you have about how the process works, because there's usually a lot of intrigue and also a lot of how exactly would that happen, but it can also act yes, as a free consultation for just where you're at in your inbox right now.
JOHN
Yes, it feels almost a bit like handing your child over to a child home just like this is definitely going to be okay, isn't it?
CLAIRE Right, your baby, yes.
JOHN
Yes. Maybe. I'm not a parent. That's a wildly inappropriate comparison [laughter].
CLAIRE
No [laughter]
JOHN Okay. Well, this has been great, Claire. Thanks very much.
CLAIRE
Thank you, John. Appreciate it.
